A report on the accretion of wealth among India’s richest has revealed that five of the country’s wealthiest families witnessed their fortunes swell by 400 per cent between 2019 and 2025, where Gautam Adani’s wealth increased by 625 per cent and Mukesh Ambani’s wealth increased by 153 per cent from 2019 to 2025, underscoring what researchers described as a deepening chasm between concentrated affluence and widespread precarity.
The study, titled Wealth Tracker India 2026 and released by the Centre for Financial Accountability in collaboration with the Tax The Top campaign, contended that a progressive wealth tax imposed on 1,688 ultra-rich individuals, each possessing net assets exceeding Rs 1,000 crore, could generate more than Rs 10 lakh crore annually, thereby enabling substantial expansion of welfare provisions while simultaneously attenuating structural inequality.
It observed that the wealth shares of the bottom 50 per cent remained stagnant at 6.4 per cent by 2024, even as the richest 1 per cent consolidated control over more than 40 per cent of national wealth, a disparity the report characterised as reminiscent of colonial-era concentration.
Researchers further noted that the cumulative wealth of the ultra-rich has surpassed Rs 166 lakh crore, representing nearly half of India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and argued that a calibrated tax regime ranging between 2 per cent and 6 per cent, supplemented by a one-third inheritance levy, could mobilise approximately Rs 10.6 lakh crore annually for social expenditure.
Such mobilisation, the report suggested, could immediately raise health and education spending by one percentage point of GDP each, while also facilitating a universal monthly pension of Rs 12,000 for the elderly.
The analysis noted that a 2 per cent wealth tax on Mukesh Ambani during the period under review could have financed free laptops for all Class 10 students for three years, while a similar levy on Gautam Adani’s expanded fortune could fund two full years of primary healthcare nationwide and provide air purifiers to nearly eight crore pollution-affected households.
The accompanying statement also highlighted that the Union government had written off Rs 19.6 lakh crore in loans over the past 11 years, arguing that policy priorities have favoured corporate tax reductions while ordinary taxpayers shoulder proportionally heavier burdens.
Campaign representatives contended that India now embodies “two Indias”, one marked by exponential enrichment among a narrow elite and another characterised by indebtedness, insecure employment, and persistent marginalisation.